The 12 stages of learning Clojure

In 2020, I've been on quite a learning journey. I joined a team where we write code in Clojure, a very different language from what I’m used to. It turns out writing Clojure is a very nice developer experience, but it could take a while to get it.

You might have to go through some (or all) of the 12 stages of learning Clojure.

😮
1. "I have no idea what I'm looking at."

😬
2. "Where does that code end? Where does it begin? Why are there so many parentheses?"

🤪
3. "I'm totally lost."

😳
4. "Will I ever learn? Am I smart enough?"

😭
5. "I will never learn. I'm not smart enough. I want ice cream!"

🤔
6. "Hmmm, wait a minute ... map, reduce, filter. This is something I recognize."

🙂
7. "Yes. Clojure, yes, yes."

🤯
8. "OMG, this language is so powerful. OMG, I even understand some of it."

🙃
9. "defn, keywords, multi-methods, macros, juxt, slurp, ha ha ha ha ..."

😀
10. "Pretty clean. Yeah, I've learned the keyboard shortcut to nicely format the code. And threading macros are nice!"

😍
11. "I ❤️ Clojure. Everything about it makes sense. It's is the language I've been searching for all my life."

🧘
12. "Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless - like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend." *

You might wonder what stage I'm currently in. Well, probably somewhere between 🙂 and 😀.

Here's some of the sources that I have learned a lot from:

• Clojure for the brave and true
• Programming Clojure
• ClojureScript Koans
• Elements of Clojure
• Learn Reagent

I'm sure I will keep trying, failing, learning and mostly smiling in 2021 ✨

^{* Yes, Bruce Lee said that.}

The ZooKeeper's New Year's Resolution

(... will probably not be lose weight. Because it has already been fulfilled)

What happened during 2020?

The Node.js ZooKeeper Client - simply called zookeeper - have been released 5 times and the current version is now 4.7.1.

🎉 Packaging

The source code is packaged differently, making the footprint a lot smaller and the install process simplified. To summarize: the ZooKeeper lost weight.

🎉 Prebuilds make the install process really, really fast

The install process is faster than ever. If you are a Mac OS X or Windows user, there is no longer any need to build an AddOn during the install process. Everything is already included in the package, thanks to a cool tool called prebuildify. Linux user? Don't worry, the installer will quickly build a Native Node.js AddOn for the Linux flavor you are running. During 2021 we will probably include prebuilds for the most common Linux flavors.

🎉 TypeScript

TypeScript declarations makes the Developer Experience very nice. With type hints, function parameter docs and autocomplete.

🎉 async zookeeper

Promise based functions are the default.
await client.create(path, data, constants.ZOO_EPHEMERAL);

🎉 Same client for all platforms

The same version of the C Client source code is now used in Linux, Mac OS X and Windows 10 to build a Node.js native AddOn. Before that, there was an issue with Windows clients connecting to a ZooKeeper server v3.4.8 that made us add a workaround - reverting to a really old client version for Windows users. But that is now solved and all platforms share the same set of modern features. Yay!

🚀 What's next?

Adding support for the new node types introduced in Apache ZooKeeper server v3.5.5:
Container and TTL. The features will probably be released during January 2021.

🎉 Happy New Year! 🎉